[T]he real offense here is … his attempt to wrap him in the Star of David and to somehow brand his opponents as traitors to the pro-Israel cause. …

[H]is invocation of “America First” and the use of a term like “renegade Jew” in the headline (though not in the text of the article) seems to echo the smears of the pro-Trump alt right racists who have attacked conservative critics of the candidate with an avalanche of anti-Semitic invective.

Horowitz’s offense was not simply criticizing Kristol’s campaign against Trump. Lots of people have done that without incurring the wrath of Commentary. And even saying that Kristol’s views are not good for Jews and Israel is commonplace: Mondoweiss, J Street, and Mearsheimer and Walt in The Israel Lobby argue that neoconservatives and the Israel Lobby have a tragically mistaken view of Jewish and Israeli interests—also discussed in Charles Bloch’s and Steve Sailer’s VDARE posts.

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The unforgivable offense: implying Kristol’s being a Jew had something to do with his opposition to Trump. After all, there would have been exactly zero upset if instead the headline was “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Republican.”

But putting ‘Jew’ in the headline was guaranteed to bring out immediate charges of anti-Semitism by the likes of Michelle Goldberg [Email her] in Slate :

To define someone as a ‘Renegade Jew’ in a column about scheming elites written for an audience full of white nationalists is to signal to the sewers. … A narrative is taking shape, an American Dolchstoßlegende that will blame a potential Trump loss on conniving Semites.

Of course, we are supposed to engage in the fiction that the opinions of Bill Kristol et al. have nothing to do with being Jewish or what is good for Israel, but everything to do with their perception of what is good for America.

While it’s obviously true that Trump has support among some Jews linked to the GOP, there is one Jewish faction that is all but apoplectic he might win [Where Jewish conservatives stand on Donald Trump: A running tally, by Ron Kampeas, Jewish Telegraph Agency, May 6, 2016]. And there can be little doubt that their opposition is fueled by their Jewish identity.

This is mystifying to some. For example, Bill O’Reilly seemed genuinely bewildered when he interviewed (at 3:00) Charles Krauthammer—another ardent neocon opponent of Trump— about a Bret Stephens article in the Wall Street Journal.

I would vote for a conservative third-party candidate or for Hillary Clinton. I regard Donald Trump as an ignorant demagogue who is one of the most dangerous candidates ever to run for the American presidency and one of the least qualified. … He has shown that he doesn’t understand the basics of policy, he has shown that he is erratic, he is xenophobic, he is guilty of sexist and racist comments …

Let’s remember, this is the guy who wants to ban all Muslims from the country, he wants to send the police breaking into American homes to round up 11 million undocumented migrants; … He has hijacked the party. … He is not remotely conservative. He is a populist demagogue, xenophobic…[BBC NewsNight (YouTube) May 9, 2016]

This sort of anger is hardly likely to come from Trump’s supposed lack of concern about “limited government,” or “commitment to the Constitution,” “true conservatism,” or even his personal qualities.

In unpacking these talking points, it’s useful to separate the red herrings from more fundamental concerns. For real conservatives, such as Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich, this election is a simple choice between someone who would be far better than Hillary Clinton on fundamental issues conservatives claim to hold dear. There is in fact a long list of Trump policies and proposals that are conservative by any reckoning—promising Scalia-like Supreme Court appointments, securing the border and deporting illegals, supporting the police against the Black Lives Matter movement, promising to end Obamacare, doing away with Common Core, taking strong pro-life and pro-Second Amendment stands, and supporting the military and veterans. [Trump unveils his potential Supreme Court nominees, by Jeremy Diamond, CNN, May 28, 2016]

For neocons, the huge expansion of entitlements, promotion of culture-destroying immigration, and rampaging budget deficits were not offenses against “conservatism.” These policies didn’t even register as a problem. It was more important that Bush carried out their (disastrous) neoconservative foreign policy.

It’s impossible to take the dedication of self-styled “conservatives” like Stephens and Kristol to conservative principles seriously. After all, they refuse to acknowledge that unless we deal with the problem of importing millions of Third Worlders who both vote for and utilize welfare and “big government,” any kind of “limited government” will be impossible.

Another very basic principle actual conservatives support is freedom of speech. Immigration threatens this as well. Universities throughout the West are under siege by the intolerant Left, and one more liberal appointment to the Supreme Court could well be the end of the First Amendment. Intellectual rationales for curtailing First Amendment freedoms, and in particular speech critical of the multicultural ideal, are already common in liberal academic circles [Why we should ban “hate speech,” by Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, August 24, 2012]. Continuing to import millions from intolerant Third World cultures does not bode well.

Yet Stephens and Kristol soft-pedal the effect the catastrophic impact of a President Hillary Clinton. Indeed, Kristol [Email him] is given to Pollyannaish tweets that a Third-Party candidate would actually win.

Trump has also supported friendly relations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia and supported an effort to achieve stability in the Middle East by propping up the Assad government in Syria. Assad and Putin are very high on the neocon hate list.

And Trump has given mixed signals on Israel, speaking about neutrality in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and avoiding money from the Republican Jewish Coalition. His most recent speech on the topic, at AIPAC, was intended to quell Jewish fears and mend fences, but the Washington Post’s token (neo)conservative Jennifer Rubin [email her] emphasized that this speech was recited from a teleprompter, implying that it didn’t reflect his real views [Trumpkins and the Jews, Washington Post, May 16, 2016]

But Trump has given no indication that he would appoint any neocons to his administration. And, unlike George W. Bush, Trump is not a babe in the woods, ready to be dominated by a coterie of neocons. This would mean that the neocons would be deprived of their primary power base, with no choice but to defect to the Democrats (whence they came).

2.) Trump represents the undoing of elite consensus on immigration, multiculturalism, and the moral imperative that white Americans become a minority in a country they created.

All of these radically Leftist positions have now been subsumed into “conservative” dogma.

The fact is neocons have never been true conservatives. They adopted conservative positions of convenience in order to appeal to the GOP base. The problem for them now: the base, energized by Trump, is finally ignoring the moral pronouncements coming from on high and voting on the issues that really matter to them, trade, jobs, and immigration. And yes, they also love Trump’s disdain for Political Correctness.

Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal is well aware that what he calls “modern conservatism” is a departure from older conservative traditions, which have been the prime target of Jewish intellectuals throughout the twentieth century, including the neoconservatives (labeled as “modern conservatives” by Stephens).

[Trumpism] is a regression to the conservatism of blood and soil, of ethnic polarization and bullying nationalism. Modern conservatives sought to bury this rubbish with a politics that strikes a balance between respect for tradition and faith in the dynamic and culture-shifting possibilities of open markets. When that balance collapses—under a Republican president, no less—it may never again be restored, at least in our lifetimes. [Emphases added throughout]

Trump’s nativism and xenophobia make him toxic with a good deal of the American Jewish community for whom such sentiments have invariably been associated with governments hostile to Jews.

Or Robert Kagan, cited above:

[Trump’s] public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of “others”—Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees—whom he depicts either as threats or as objects of derision. His program, such as it is, consists chiefly of promises to get tough with foreigners and people of nonwhite complexion. He will deport them, bar them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut up.

Contra Stephens, the neocons never respected tradition and gave only lip service to faith. Their only outreach was recruiting Evangelical Christians to the cause of a rabidly pro-Israel foreign policy.

Stephens is correct in that there was an older tradition of conservatism based on the ethno-national interests of the traditional American majority. This was purged by the neocons. They are now afraid it is returning, perhaps in the form of the Alt Right—the only recognizable intellectual constituency that supports Trump.

In fact, the intellectual antecedents of the Alt Right go back much further than the conservatives of the 1980s who were purged by the neocons. Their roots go back to Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, Henry Pratt Fairchild, William Ripley, Gustave Le Bon, Charles Davenport, and William McDougall. The Alt Right is an updated version of this intellectual milieu of the early twentieth century when America was self-consciously a European, Christian nation and proud of it [Enemies of my enemy, by Kevin MacDonald, KevinMacDonald.com, Accessed May 20, 2016]. They go back to Charles Lindbergh and the America First movement that has received so much attention since Trump began using the phrase. Significantly, the ADL was among those urging Trump to abandon the phrase [ADL urges Donald Trump to Reconsider “America First” in Foreign Policy Approach, ADL, April 28, 2016]

This early conservative tradition was eradicated by the rise of Franz Boas and the other Jewish-dominated intellectual movements of the left discussed in The Culture of Critique—an intellectual framework that has been embraced by the neocons.

As Robert Kagan writes of Trump:

If he wins the election, his legions will comprise a majority of the nation. Imagine the power he would wield then. In addition to all that comes from being the leader of a mass following, he would also have the immense powers of the American presidency at his command: the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence services, the military. Who would dare to oppose him then? Certainly not a Republican Party that laid down before him even when he was comparatively weak. And is a man like Trump, with infinitely greater power in his hands, likely to become more humble, more judicious, more generous, less vengeful than he is today, than he has been his whole life? Does vast power un-corrupt?

It’s not that Trump is bringing “fascism,” it’s that there’s a chance he might be bringing freedom for European-Americans. And for all their talk of tolerance, that’s one thing the Culture of Critique will never allow.

Kevin MacDonald [email him] is emeritus professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach. His research has focused on developing evolutionary perspectives in developmental psychology, personality theory, Western culture, and ethnic relations (group evolutionary strategies). He edits and is a frequent contributor to The Occidental Observer and The Occidental Quarterly. For his website, click here.